Tag: Gaza

Let’s Talk About Genocide: The United Nations Lack of Responsibility to Protect from and Prevent Israel’s Genocide of the Palestinian People

For other articles in this series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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In the summer of 2012, UNICEF and UNRWA asked if Gaza will be liveable by 2020. At the time- five years into Israel’s siege, and post Israel’s 2008 and 2012 carpet-bombing campaigns- one might have been led to think that if the situation only had eight more stable years to go until apocalypse, then it probably doesn’t look too good already. What one might have missed is that Gaza in 2020, as in 2017, as in 2012, is what genocide looks like.

Continue reading “Let’s Talk About Genocide: The United Nations Lack of Responsibility to Protect from and Prevent Israel’s Genocide of the Palestinian People”

Let’s Talk About Genocide: Shurat HaDin and The Genocide Legalization Conference

For other articles in this series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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This week, the organization Shurat HaDin is having a conference titled “Towards a New Law of War”. They don’t hide where their alliances lie, and on their online conference page (nostalgically illustrated with WWII British bombers) you can find their Western-supremacist and racist agenda stated loud and clear:

…exchange ideas regarding the development of armed conflict legal doctrine favorable to Western democracies engaged in conflict against non­traditional, non­-democratic, non-­state actors.

Continue reading “Let’s Talk About Genocide: Shurat HaDin and The Genocide Legalization Conference”

A Letter To The Arabs

According to TV sources, the child was killed shortly after the video was uploaded.

A Letter To The Arabs

We are doing fine in Gaza,
Tell us how are YOU doing?
We are doing fine in Gaza,
What about you?
Our martyrs under the rubble
Our children in tents
Asking about you
Where are you?
We are doing fine in Gaza
Tell us how are YOU doing?
The sea is behind us
But we are fighting.
Our enemy is before us
We are still fighting.
We have enough arms
Food, and peace initiatives
We thank you for your support
Our souls, our wounds, our homes,
our faces, our blood, our eyes, our coffins
protect us
from your promises
from your talk.
We are doing fine in Gaza
Tell us how are YOU doing?

Collective Punishment and the Value of Israeli vs. Palestinian Lives

The following post was written by my colleague and friend Mohamad Elmasry, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Denver’s Center for Middle East Studies whose MA thesis examined American newspaper coverage of death in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In the aftermath of the tragic killings of three Israeli teenagers, Gaza has been bombed (yet again). More than 30 targets were hit last evening. Israel is good at collective punishment. We know this.

The murder of the three Israeli teens is quite awful. What is also awful is that these three kids will get more news coverage than the hundreds of Palestinian kids killed by Israel in the last several years. Numerous academic research studies all say the same thing: western reportage favors and humanizes the Israeli perspective, while delegitimizing and condemning the Palestinian perspective. The research also shows that Israeli deaths are covered more prominently than Palestinian deaths. For western media, Israeli lives are worth more than Palestinian lives. It’s that simple, really.

Palestinians do not have a military, and — after having been robbed of their land, slaughtered, and kicked out of their homes in 1948 — have been illegally occupied for nearly half a century. For many years, the US and Israel have been virtually the only countries in the world to vote against the UN resolution for “peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine,” which would require Israel to end its illegal occupation. The vote is usually something like 160 to 5 (with the Marshall Islands and Micronesia always voting with the US. and Israel, and the rest of the world voting in the other direction). In November 2012, the vote was 163 to 6. Israel and the US have also systematically obstructed peace negotiations, as has been meticulously documented by Norman Finkelstein and other leading scholars.

The occupation is utterly brutal (one need only consult any of the countless independent eyewitness accounts, or, alternatively, the human rights reports). Palestinians can do nothing without the permission of the Israeli Defense Forces, are not allowed freedom of movement, do not have control over their own resources, and have to put up with the regular home demolitions that make room for illegal Israeli settlements. Over the years, many thousands of Palestinians have been killed — including more than 1,300 children between 2000 and 2011 alone — and many thousands more imprisoned while defending themselves against IDF atrocities.

We Americans give Israel several billion dollars per year in aid. Most of us (Americans) do not know the first thing about the conflict and are too consumed with our busy lives (i.e. sporting events, television shows, movies, etc.) to give a damn what our government does with our tax dollars. To add insult to injury, our national media reportage of the conflict is dreadful, and, occasionally balanced reporting notwithstanding, overwhelmingly projects Palestinians as the aggressors and Israelis as the victims. Many studies have confirmed this basic finding. See the studies cited below, among numerous others.

REFERENCES

Ackerman, S., (2001). “Al-Aqsa Intifada and the U.S. Media.”Journal of Palestine Studies, v30 i2 p61.

Dunsky, M., (2001). “Missing: The Bias Implicit in the Absent.” Arab Studies Quarterly, v23 i3 p1.

Elmasry M. H., (2009) “Death in the Middle East: An Analysis of How the New York Times and Chicago Tribune framed killings in the second Palestinian Intifada.” Journal of Middle East Media 5(1).

Friel, H. & Falk, R. (2007). Israel-Palestine On Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East. London-New York: Verso.

Ross, S. D. (2003). “Framing of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in thirteen months of New York Times editorials surrounding the attack of September 11, 2001.” Conflict & Communication online, vol. 2, No. 2.

Viser, M. (2003). “Attempted Objectivity: An Analysis of the New York Times and Ha’aretz and Their Portrayals of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Vol. 8 Issue 4, p114.

 

Mohamad Elmasry is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver and an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of North Alabama. Previously he was Assistant Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at The American University in Cairo (AUC). His work has appeared in the Journal of Middle East Media, the International Communication Gazette, the Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research, International Journal of Communication, Global Media Journal, Political Violence @ a Glance, Al Jazeera English, openDemocracy, The Immanent Frame and Jadaliyya, among other publications.

Tightening the Siege

by Amal Amireh

“We Travel Like Other People”

“Mamnou3,”* she said from behind the window. The harshness of the word was neither softened by its familiarity nor by the lazy gesture that accompanied it when she threw my application back to me.

It was eleven on a cloudless June day. I have been standing in line since 5 o’clock that morning. I was twenty-four. She looked eighteen. I ventured, “Why?”

Her laziness immediately turned into impatience. “Mamnou3!” She repeated, already looking at the next heavily stamped travel application in front of her. Then as if to end any possibility of a conversation, and my future with it, she uttered the dreaded words: “Roukh baitak!”**

There she was in my city, actually few blocks from my home, shooing me away in an Arabic accented with contempt, and deciding my life for me. Her military uniform, her gun which is never far from her, and the bureaucratic authority of an illegal occupation gave her words a finality designed to crush. Just like bulldozers.

These words were the final stamp that sealed my application—an application that I had submitted a month earlier requiring permission to travel from El Bireh in the West Bank to Boston in the United States after receiving a Fulbright scholarship via AMIDEAST. I had graduated from the English Department at Birzeit University two years earlier, despite checkpoints and closures that in my senior year alone totaled seven months. This scholarship was my only chance for graduate education.

But the gods of military occupation had decreed that summer that no one between the ages of eighteen and thirty is allowed to leave the West Bank until further notice. Of course there was no official announcement of such a decree. That would spoil the arbitrariness of it all and give the occupied the dangerous notion that they are owed any explanation at all. You just learn of it when you compare notes with other crushed souls who were told to go home.

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Resistance threads

On Saturday 18 September, the fifth, and most ambitious convoy leaves for Gaza. From London, Casablanca and Doha three simultaneous routes consisting of hundreds of vehicles to break the siege. Three times in the last eighteen months Viva Palestina has broken Israel’s siege, each time successfully delivering their aid, despite Israel’s murderous assault on the Freedom Flotilla , they fully intend to deliver this time too. Our VIVA PALESTINA 5 T-shirt will be worn by all drivers and crew. Sales of the shirt help fund the convoy. We can’t all be on this incredible journey to bring vital material aid and international solidarity to Gaza but by wearing this shirt we are all convoy members.

Courtesy of the team at Philosophy Football.


Gaza’s Medical Misfortunes

Local health officials in Gaza say that millions of dollars in medication donated by the international community ultimately ends up  as trash because 70 % of it is unusable. Doctors claim that approximately 20% of the donated medication has either expired or is near expiration, and that a large portion of the drugs simply do not address the healthcare needs of Gazans. A case in point was a recent two million dollar donation of H1N1 medication, which arrived in Gaza after the threat of the virus had passed. Amongst the list of 150 drugs that ARE urgently needed in Gaza are antibiotics and cancer treatment medication, both of which continue to be lacking in the donations being sent.

Israeli piracy and murder: An act of self defence?

By Harsha Walia

As international outrage spreads at the Israeli elite commando attack on an unarmed humanitarian convey in the middle of the night on international waters, Israel is desperately trying to rebrand the incident as one of self-defence. It is nothing new for Israel, and other aggressing powers, to smear their victims as perpetrators. Afterall, unjustifiable murder is too jarring to stomach.

Yet, Amnesty International released a statement about Israel’s excessive use of force, further stating that Israel’s version of events begs credibility.  Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu proclaimed the actions of Israel as “completely inexcusable”. According to Craig Murray, specialist on maritime law, “To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal.”

Deported activists tell a horrifying story of the use of electric shock, live ammunition, smoke bombs, gas canisters, beatings, and seizure of all evidence on cameras. Greek activist Michalis Grigoropoulos said, “They took us hostage, pointing guns at our heads…There was absolutely nothing we could do.” A Turkish woman, with her 1 year old baby, recalls “The ship turned into a lake of blood.”

Israeli-Arab Knesset member Hanin Zoabi, who was on board, demanded an international inquiry: “It was clear from size of force that boarded ship that purpose was not to stop sail, but to cause largest number of fatalities to prevent future initiatives.” In contradiction of the carefully managed public relations campaign, a top Israeli Navy commander brags to the Jerusalem Post that “We boarded the ship and were attacked as if it was a war.” The names of the 10-19 dead, 60-80 injured, and hundreds detained have yet to be released.

Continue reading “Israeli piracy and murder: An act of self defence?”

The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 23-25.04.2010

Emad Rezqaafter being shot with an aluminium canister. Photograph by Hamde Abu Rahmeh

Friday in Bil’in, friend and fellow activist, Emad Rezqa was hit in the forehead by an aluminum tear gas projectile shot directly at him by Israeli soldiers during the weekly anti-Wall demonstration. He suffered a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage, and is currently hospitalized at the Hadassa Ein Karem hospital in Jerusalem. The demonstration Rezqa was injured in concluded the three-day International Bil’in Conference on Popular Struggle, and was attended by hundreds of people. Several other demonstrators were injured from gas inhalation, direct hits by gas canisters, and falling

This is the man who fired the canisters:
Bil'in 23.04.2010 - The day Israeli soldiers started shooting randomly into the crowd. one fractured skull and five arrested. - 16
I was later arrested along with Palestinian journalist Moheb Barghouti, two fellow Israelis and a Mexican activist, after staging a sit-in. (more details soon)

Continue reading “The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 23-25.04.2010”